A Jungle of Tales

              'The Left Hand of Darkness' is an exploration of a society without permanent sex or gender; a very bold and interesting book, especially considering it was published in 1969. It is challenging in its structure as well as its themes, because it alternates primarily between reports from an Earthman named Genly Ai, who is stationed on the planet Gethen as a mobile of the Ekumen 1 , and the journal of a Gethenian named Estraven. Interspersed with these voices are reports from other Ekumen visitors, which mostly serve as anthropological exposition, and Gethenian legends, which usually foreshadow events and ideas in the main story.             Gethen is a cold world; early Ekumen visitors dubbed it 'Winter' because it is in the middle of a long ice age. The Gethenians we meet somewhat resemble the Inuit, being short and stocky with yellow-brown ...

              Holy crap, this book surprised me in the best way! Between the slightly goofy-sounding title and the tone of the cover blurb, I was expecting a light horror-comedy in a mint-juleps and magnolia version of the South, possibly with some ill-advised vampire romance. And that might have been all right, but that is not what this book is. What it is is basically a Southern Gothic thriller with a bit of dark humor, that happens to involve a vampire 1 .             Patricia Campbell is a housewife living in a relatively affluent suburb of Charleston, South Carolina in the 1980s. She is going out of her mind with frustration and boredom, so she joins a club of similarly afflicted ladies who like to get together and read true crime and murder mysteries. It is around that time that things start to go a bit strange in the neighborhood. Patricia fin...

              This is a gorgeous, fascinating novella. How to describe it? My first thought on having it described to me was: "This sounds like Doctor Who (fanfiction) meets  'Good Omens' (fanfiction), and I must read it immediately." That impression was not wrong. The two protagonists are eternal time-travelers on opposite sides of a never-ending conflict who are each other's perfect foil, and who over time realize that they not only actually like each other, they love each other enough to take the risk of seeking a third way that will allow them to be together. However, this book is still its own beast - and what a sharp-toothed, extravagantly plumaged beast it is.             Red comes from a post-singularity technotopia; she was grown in a pod and has all sorts of mechanical modifications 1 . Blue comes from the Garden, a galaxy-spanning con...

              Given the growing popularity of "urban fantasy", and the fact that multiple Neil Gaiman books have already been adapted for the screen, I'm quite surprised this is not one of them. 'Neverwhere' takes place in London - but the city we see, London Above is only half of it. London Below is a colorful, dangerous, fantastical place made up of lost pieces of the upper world and the people who fall through the cracks.  London Below is inspired by intriguing place names in the city: there really is a small medieval court in Earl's Court, a convent of Black Friars, an Angel named Islington, and so on. It has its own politics and mysteries and conflicts...which one Upworlder, Richard Mayhew, finds himself caught up in.             Richard is seemingly an ordinary, even rather unimpressive, young man. He works in an office...

              This story is very difficult to describe except as "enchanting".   It clearly belongs to the Magical Realism style along with books like 'The House of the Spirits' and 'The Master and Margarita' . The tale centers on three generations of a family: Harriet Araminta Lee 1 , her mother Margot, and her teenage daughter Perdita. There is something a bit "witchy" about these women - their prematurely grey hair, their family recipe for gingerbread that sometimes has odd effects, Perdita's collection of doll-plant hybrids that talk - but they neither directly identify as witches nor even note that there is anything unusual about their family.             At the beginning of the book the Lees are living in London but Margo and Harriet reputedly come from Druh á strana, an island not noted on maps or acknowledged as real by any country except ...

              Ursula LeGuin is one of the most "anthropological" science-fiction writers I know. As demonstrated in 'The Left Hand of Darkness' 1 , she liked to tweak the rules of a society or the workings of human biology to see how it would affect ordinary people's lives. These four stories, all contained in the compilation 'The Birthday of the World', deal with three societies with extremely different expectations for what love and relationships between people should look like. Most focus on sexual and romantic relationships 2 , but in the case of 'Solitude' relationships of any kind are considered somewhat dangerous.   1. In brief, the people featured in that book, the Gethenians, are 'ambisexual': most of the time they exist in an androgynous, asexual state called somer, but they periodically enter into a sexual state called kemmer in which any individual may be either male or female. 2. Alt...